Transcripts For CSPAN2 Author Discussion On Memoirs 20240713

University. Her essays have been published in the american scholar, best american essays and best African American essays. She is the Julian Lindsey graham professor of english at the university of vermont. Her latest book stories from my grandmothers time my mothers time and mine is an extraordinary exquisitely written memoir that looks at race and a fearless and true way. In 12 connected a deeply personal essays that support up close the complexities and boxes of the haunting memories and ambushing realities of growing up black in the south with a family name inherited from a white man of getting a phd from yale, marrying a white man from the north, adopting two babies room ethiopia, teaching at a White College and living in americas new england today, Henry Louis Gates calls it a major contribution and Washington Post says its magnificent. Carolyn is an american poet, editor, translator and activist. Her books of poetry or blue hour the angel of history the country betweenou us and gathering of s. Tribes. In 2013, she received the academy of american poets fellowship given for distinguished poetic f achievemt and in 2017 she became one of the first to receive the prize. Shes a professor at georgetowne university. Margaret atwood calls thehe new book what you have heard is true a memoir of witness and resistance astonishing, powerful, so important at this time. Its a devastating lyrical memoir of a young womans brave choice to engage with horror in a border to help others. A dani shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoir the hourglass still writing, devotion in slow motion and five novels. In the inheritance of a memoir of genealogy, fraternity, she confronts a staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test. Her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history, the life sheng s livedd crumpled beneath her. Inheritance is a book about the extraordinary time in which we live, the time in which science and technology has outpaced not only medical ethics o but also e capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. In the New York Times book review they found inheritance profound, the true drama of inheritance isnt the discovery of her fathers identity, but the meaning she makes of it. Shapiros account is beautifully written and deeply moving. It brought me to tearsea more tn once, she said. So, please join me in welcoming emily bernard, caroline and dani shapiro. [applause] oh, everybody. Im going to read from a few of the essays in my book. First is the title essay black isir the body. Black history. My brown waters became black when they were 6yearsold. They were watching Television One day in february, black history month. A commercial came on. It was more like a 32nd history lesson. A commemoration of a pilot, poet orpi politician. First black as a writer i know calls them, them being the racial pioneers, the inaugural negroes come before most africanamericans to break through the racial barriers in their chosen fields and by breakthrough. We are black, she said to isabella. No, we are brown, she responded. But they called it black. Julia explained. Despite my efforts to shield them, my daughters had somehow gotten wise to the absurd and illogical nature of american racial identity. Blackness, julia figured out, had nothing to do with actual skin color. Blackness, she had come to understand was an external identity, external to her anyway. Race is something other people identified, something they said not necessarily saw. Blackness, she had intended it was a social category, not a coloria but the condition. And like it or not, it was time she was informing her sister to get with the program. And my granddaughters were becoming black. My heart sank. It wasnt blackness per se that caused my heart to think. I enjoyed being black, but it took me a long time to get here to this place of racial pleasure. My earliest experiences of blackness were defined by an unpleasant and uncomfortable hypervigilance. Being black meant you had to be constantly aware that you could never really be at his. Early on, i got wise to the fact that being black and white placement oa whiteplacement of a safe place, not for you. In my family, race wasnt an obstruction or theory or outdated consequence of history, buten the act of living foundatn of our reality. To determine the contours of the choice we made, every mundane public act be performed with a project with a name. When we moved into our house was cold integration. When my older brother and i entered the Public School system, it was cold desegregation. The split between black and blackandwhite wasnt metaphorical. Railroad tracks divided blackandwhite nashville. As on the white side of town, south nashville, we played a role in the grand project of enormous proportions. We lived in south nashville but inas the north nashville we coud be black in a way that wasnt possible in any other part of the city. In north nashville no one wife was watching. We could relax. We were free. North nashville is where my father practiced medicine and where we attend did events at this university. My parents on the modern and one of the countrys oldest. North nashville is where we attended church at a small chapel that was established for the faculty and staff for which both of my parents received their graduate degree. Among the parishioners in the chapel where men and women even though we had no biological relationship we shared something bigger and more profound. History. We celebrate or believe in god and a common pride in how we all need ineeded over and broke thr. We were a community built in spite and because of racism because if it hadnt been for the white supremacy, schools may never have existed. But my daughters were not born under the shadow of this history. It was by the ideology and divinity but not by blood. When they were 12 months ol oldt ththeassumed dual citizenship in america. Once when we were out of town visiting family, i told it black historyy month story and i could see the story unsettled them. I tried to explain my reasons for having wanted to protect my daughters from the language of race but my explanation seemed only to make them more impatient. Dont yout want them to know yor history, his cousin asked. I knew what she meant. She meant slavery, segregation and the civil rights movement, frederick douglass, Sojourner Truth and rosa parks, martin, malcolm and others. February stories, which has american stories belong to her, this White American woman, more than they do to my daughters. I am an african who lives in america come isabella explained one day. She was recounting a conversation she had with aou thirdgrade classmate. The african childrens choir had come to burlington into the class had taken a field trip to see them perform a. Later that day come isabellas classmate a in an attempt to identify the difference she perceived between isabella and the children on stage had referred to isabella as an africanamerican. Isabella corrected her. While it may think that im an american, i am african. When i came to this country, she continued, astonishment made it difficult for me to continue paying attention that my daughter had such a fine sense of her place in the world might have been known. Her implicit assessment of my role as essentially a porter in the stage of her life journey felt appropriate. My daughters have i flipped through picture books that told of the underground churches carved out of rocks. I showed them websites that pictures entry old drawings in the modern photographs of ethiopian kings and queens. Yours is the only african country to fight off colonizers i remind them often. Every mother thinks her daughters lookk like angels, but my daughtersoo do resemble those that commonly Ethiopian Orthodox Christians iconography. This slavery all over the world even in ethiopia. I am proud that my daughters were born in a world where angels and aristocrats look just like them. My husband and i adopted our children and i want to read a little piece from the essay i wrote about the experience of going to ethiopia. This is in the middle of the journey to pick them up but i think it will be clear. We drive slowly as the road bends and disappears as if it had surrendered to the landscape around us. Helen had told us the road would end and we would have to walk for an hour to meet the girls and their family. Our american agent dismissed the information as another one of her fantastic stories. They pulled the car to a stop among the cactus with the stemsc as wide as paddles and decorated with the bristles like stubble on the manss face. Only 3 yards between us but the voices sound far away. Underneath my feet, the earth that is light and packed as brown sugar within arms reach of the small island of green bordered by a layer of rocks and in the Center Stands a tree with a thin trunk and flowering after, excuse me, flowering crown withlo a small skinny kid with an afro. In the distance more trees, some stand in a line. This guy is sick with all of the blue left in the world. I nearly tripped on pieces of shale. My boots catch in the valley of crevices between them. My son discovers that the skin beneath my hair, had interest of my clothing. I feel his piercing impact in my joints and lungs. If we had been in the states, if we were anywhere else, i would have been preoccupied with howh soon i could seek out some shade under which to hide, but here even as i stumble and trudge my way forward, i begin to understand beneath the piercings on and breathtaking sky is exactly wheret i belong. Everything lies in front of me. Nothing is behind. There is no shelter, nowhere to hide. It may be relentless but its glorious, too evaporating any doubts about the road ahead. I standt up straight. The heat isnt something to shun neither side, but something onlt to c carry. As we approach perfect cylinders of long grass my heart beat rapidly and i covered it with my hand. I smoothed my shirt and adjustt my hat. I hope i look like with the whae family wants further plans. As we were greeted by the people to whom t the girls belong to imagine a woman being presented to a grim at the inauguration of anur arranged marriage. Be prepared to be treated like royalty, she had written an unusually helpful email. Indeed the family slaughtered a sheep in our honor. A large pattern sits on the clay table with a loaf of bread that was placed on the side. Everyone gathers to eat but after a few bites i sit back on a bench molded from the same clay as the table and walls of the circular room. I try to arrange my features to an expression that communicates my appreciation for the food, my desire to enjoy it and my inability to do so. I am not successful it is clear. I can tell that youre trying to translate the disappointment that ive caused. Its terrible to know that i am failing to demonstrate the gratitude i feel for everyone in this room. Emotion is caught in my throat, my palms tingle. Rigid with anticipation, eager for the wonderful, terrible moment in which the girls will be placed in our arms. Besides the john drinks from a tin cup. I cannot say no i when it is offered to me. I feel their eyes as they bring the cup to my mouth. Their grandmother bring out the baby that we will know as isabella. Wrapped in the same light blue outfit she wears in the picture since months ago. Her grandfather a woman with a lightly wrinkled face stands in a space that separates the family home. The sky shines a movie star light on the two of them. Julia emerges and is afraid because she has never seen white skin and she gently touches johns arm. Lishe continues to cry as we std outside of the compounds that we are presented they could serve as props in a bugshe bunny cartoon. John gathers us together for a photograph and we begin the trek back to the land rover. The return hike feels more arduous, but some half, the air dry. Im trying not to show my exhaustion. The grandmother has her strapped to her back. Her steps are light. I walk next to one of the cousins. A girl of 11 or 12. Her eyes were larges and kind. The braids in her hair shine. We take turns looking at each other and then walking away catches us. Ther one theres so much i want to ask and tell her but the membrane of language fine and opaque at once travels with us like a glass partition. Even though it feels silly the next time i see her looking i need her and for the second time today put my hand over my heart and press m down hard. She looks away and is still smiling. You are part of our family now, an older cousin tells us thats it for goodbyes. John and i are hustled into the car whose rumbling engine inspired more for julia. The babies were shuffled or found. I told julia who screams into stairs with tears cascading from her eyes. Isabella rests quietly in johns lap in his arms and chest. Suddenly she sits up and opens up herer mouth slightly. Julia follows suit. Before the second round i take my hat and turn it upside down underneath her chin. Three hours later we have become used to the smell and feeling our daughters vomit on our clothing. We are sticky with heat and sweat and bodily fluids by the time we arrive at the airport. John leaves the girls with me while he rushes to the bathroom to clean up my hat and rinse off his shirt. With abb tucked into each arm, i sink into a plastic chair. My dizziness and blurry vision must be a result of the heat i think. An older woman sits down next to arms open. Er i hand her julia and she pulls the blanket from her belongings and hands it to me. She and john take my arms when its time to board. I still feel righetti but have a firm grip on isabella who emerges from the cloth on my shoulder slowly as a plant sprouting from the earth in a time lapse video. She stretches her neck like a periscope and puts her head slowly with a stern look on her face, like a general assessing a battlefield or the atlantic i think and when she smiles i believe we are sharing our first private joke. Julia has decided it is my particular job to tend to her son sean and i trad john and i e they are seated. She and i fall asleep quicklye after takeoff. A few minutes later, the wave of pain propelled me out of my seat and towards the bathroom. Along the way i shove a miserably and indignant at julia into the arms of a pretty flight attendant. I am on mim on my hands and kne throes of seizing abdominal pain when the attendant knocks onbd e door. Asn soon as i empty the launch, she snatches the door open. I looked up and im perpendicular. Madam, your baby and she presents me with julia looks down on mwho looksdown on me wio be alarmed on her 12 monthap old face. The thing about unpasteurized milk is that it doesnt agree with everyone. Ih spend the next few days on ad around the floor of our Hotel Bathroom. My stomach is in a war with bacteria. Gradually unable to climb onto the bed that night while on my back breathing deeply with my mouth open. Late at night john takes the girls to lobby when they become restless. Julia doe does this while john n combes isabella by pushing her r 2 inches back and forth until the short rhythmic motion coaxes her to sleep. Thank you. [applause] it is a pleasure to read with you. Im going to read from what you have heard is true. Most of it takes place in el salvador before the war and the two years leading up to the war. The cousin of the poet whom i translated the previous summer. Im going to read some scenes from the book. It is near the end now. We are walking in the rippling heat of a sorghum field. Cicadas to the empty sky. A man uncorks a water garden and another leans against a spade. Theres a woman, too, wearing an apron skirt overr her trousers. Hard light and the dry rattle of sorghum seed. One ofay the men takes him aside and told him something. A secret, like everything else. We get into the cheap and without explanation drive to another place not far from this field. They would have walked measuring distance not income on others but hoursrs or days. What are we looking for, i asked, and as always, he doesnt answer, swearing under his breath in the haze of smoke that hangs in the air where the corn had been growing. We stopped near a cluster made of mud. One of themm has collapsed and smoke rises from it. Wait here, he tells me, but i dont. I have stopped waiting for him months before this. But he cant seem to break the habit of telling me to wait. Ouoke is rolling along the fields just above the blackened stubble. We walk and then he stops, i stop and when he continues, i continue. He poems the air to say slow down or be quiet. I slow down in a quiet. When we reach, no one is there. None one is home. A large plastic bowl used for making the slurry that becomes tortilla dough is overturned on the ground. Theres a childs tshirt in the slurry. Behind one, it appears that several tens have been held by their feet and clapped against a stone. They are lying on the ground, one of them still opening and closing its peak. A hundred or so meters more and we hear the whine of flies, the hissing and belching of turkey vultures, the flapping of wings like applause in the maize stalks as the birds try to lift themselves. A flatbed truck follows at a distance behind us. They are calling out to us or to the driver of the truck, but i dont understand what they say. I dont know what i had expected to see, but its not the swollen torso of a man with one arm attached to him, a a blackpool f tar. I didnt expect his head with the body itself some s distance away without eyes or lips. The stench in the air is familiar. A routing, sweet, thickening snow. Human death. I bend down when i see the head of a year than announcing dont touch it, let the others do it. At first, i thought they were going to find the rest of the man and placed his remains in the truck. But instead, they gather the arms and hands, legs with feet attached and bring them to the torso where it lies on the ground. They said t set the head, neck t once had abandoned the three men take off their straw hat and stand in a circle around them tn they have reassembled. They stand and one crosses himself likely. The parts are not quite touching. This soil between them especially the head. Birds nearby hoping we will go away and leave them to this meal. The error homes. We thought. Why doesnt anyone do something, i think i asked. On this day i will learn the human head weighs about two and a half kilos. I went into a prison ostensibly to visit someone but i pretended to have known in the past, but the purpose of the visit was to look around in the prison and be shown something that i was then to talk about on the outside. So i will just begin in the middle of this walk inside the prison. We turned a corner where a group of Prison Guards had gathered in a circle playing a game with dice, thoroughly occupied in the game, tossing dice and laughing or groaning, no one looked at us. We have made almost a full circle of this courtyard on all four wings. Miguel looked around cautiously. He whispered are you ready. He locked eyes with me then asked if i saw the dark open doorway nearby. I did. It wasnt quite as 10 feet away. A room with an entrance like the very, like the work rooms but it was on the other side of the courtyard, the far side. No one is paying attention to you now, just walk into that room and try to see what you can. Dont stay long and control your face when you come out. I will be right here. If anyone sees you and asks what you are doing, just make an absent minded north american lady face and he imitated such a face by looking at me blankly with his mouth slightly open. I have never seen anyone do that before and i didnt realize that this is what he looks like two others. Just say that you got lost. For the moment i froze and then he smiled and nodded yes, tossing his head in the direction of the doorway. I was inside of the room. It was darker than any other room in the prison. I tried to adjust my eyes to the darkness, tried to see. It was what he was always asking me to do, try to see, look at the world, he would say. What i saw were wooden boxes bos about the size of washing machines bb even a little smaller. I counted the boxes. There were sick and they had a small openings cut into the front with chicken wire mesh over the openings. They were padlocked. As i stood there is some of the boxes started to wobble a little and i realized that there were men inside them. Fingers came through one of the mesh openings. Blood rushed to my ears and i stood trying to orient myself so that i could know not only where the room was also which full the boxes were against and then i walked slowly towards the life ofno the open doorway and into e hall where he was standing. As i came towards him, he whispered tie your sweater sleeves around your neck, you have hives. I get them not as often as they once did childhood frequently. When i was afraid or nervous or sad they bloomed on my face andv back. So i did as he asked. Thats the darkness, solitary. Sometimes men are held in there for a year and cant move when they come out because of the atrophy of their muscles. Some of them never recover their minds. Tell them on the outside. Told them. Then raising his voice, he said its been nice to see you again. He was walking, whispering again. Its time now for you to go. At the entrance he was waiting as promised plea had surrounded him and they were looking through the windows. He rested his hand on my shoulder and we began walking sidebyside. Where are they, i dont know i guess we are going to find out. They worked at the Catholic University and it was the place they worked we were there for a day and this is what happened when we left. That evening we planned to meet with some of their friends and a few european journalists who arrived several weeks earlier. We would listen to reports on what theyjo had seen and told tm what we knew. There would be cocacola and potato chips. We were still in the clothing we have chosen that morning so we did what but i would never have been able to run in those shoes. I could barely walk in them. They pulled out of the parking lot ont onto what i would call a slip road narrow and unlit. She was laughing and teasing me when suddenly she said my name and the car was flooded with light. The vehicle behind us was following so closely a person could have leapt from one room to the other. She sped into a tunnel of darkness ahead in the vehicle behind this. I turned around to watch the other car but i couldnt see it through the light. I remember calling out. Can you go faster, and no i cannot. This is as fast as i can go and i think im lost. There is the city ahead. Of us n the practice of liberation i wanted to be brave. I didnt feel brave. They were still behind us when they reached a heavier traffic and behind us when we got to the roundabout and that is when the honking began. Others whose drivers saw what was happening and others pulling into the roundabout even some were stopping and getting out and then there was an opening and we took it all the way to the house of the friends we didnt breathe and then the doors were opening and we ran through it from the front of the house to theof garden in the bak where they were standing around in the dark. There is some passages from notebooks kept at the time and they are in a different language partly because they were written 40 years ago and partly because they wroti wrote them when i war intense pressure and i wanted to get everything down on paper. This is the village abandoned the road stretching between the shacks and there is a picture decorated with foil stars. There is no smoke rising from the fire were the women would have turned nor any from those that were through the village during the search and destroy operation. People returned here briefly as they gathered at the dead and where this was possible they poured wine over the assembled remains until the body seemed covered and a woman that hid in the branches had her skirt in knots as she told the story of what happened but she had so rubbed her eyes from greek at all she had could be seen in a different religion and told a story of having pretended to be dead in place of the cries of children for their parents the rain picking against the roof got slipped into the homes of the regime. The blood of the dead cousins husband tried. But they also wrote the poet gives us a gallery full of ghosts shaken by the fire and darkness of his time. Over the years i have been asked why is he 27yearold pilot spoke spanish profamily and knew nothing about the americas i would expect the invitation of a man i barely knew to spend time in a country on the verge of war and why would this stranger said to be a lone wolf, a communist, cicommunist,cia operative, worls marksman and smalltime coffee farmer take any interest in the north american poet as one man put it what does poetry have to do with anything . We reached the chosen place and opened the box and before digging my hands into his remains, i asked him quietly if i might tell the story now. Of course he bellows do not waste time why do you think i brought you in the first place. You are a poet. People ask me now what it was like to work with him in the early days before the war. Some still want to know who he really was of course that is now becoming apparent to friends and enemies as he knew it might one day it was as if they removed the blindfold and ordered me to open my eyes. [applause] such a privilege and honor. Im going to read a bit from the opening and then skip ahead and read a passage i dont read very often. When i was a girl i would sneak down the hall late at night once my parents were asleep. Ive locked myself in the bathroom, climb onto the floor and get as close as possible until io was nose to nose withy own reflection. This wasnt an exercise in the simple self absorption of childhood. The stakes were held high. I was looking for something i couldnt possibly have articulated. If i waited long enough, my face would begin to morph. Many features softened into shape shifted until i was able to see another face, a different face. Now its Early Morning and im in a small Hotel Bathroom 3,000 miles from home. 53yearsold and its a long time since i was that girl. Woman, wife, mother, writer, teacher. Daughter. It seems to sway or perhaps it is my body crumbling. I trace my fingers across the plains of my cheekbones down my neck across my classical as if to be certain i still exist. It would come over me on street corners and curves and air stations. I will take it as a scientist lowdown. Fueled the fact you are still you 24 hours earlier i was in my home office trying to get organized for the trip to the west coast i have made a packing list and there were a million things to do it was good at reading the sound of my husbands footsteps. These sounded urgent that i couldnt help whether they were good urgent forbade urgent. Whatever it was we didnt have time for it. My email had reached her at the conference and she had written back right away that she had indeed done genetic testing and looked to see if she had the results with her on her computer. It was a Family History i was proud of and i loved. Our uncle had been president of the orthodox. Our grandparents, colors in america and israel as a grown woman i wasnt remotely religious. I had a powerful barely romantic sense of my family and its past. There was a steep and rapid decline the sudden interest in genealogy was surprising to me but i understood he was hoping to learn more about his roots while hiss dad was still around. It is in fact the small undramaticin they sat on the kitchen counter for days perhaps weeks unopened and became a part of the scenery. Thhe said the dog, scout recyclg alll the while they remained sealed in their green and white boxes decorated with a line drawing of a three leafne clove. They opened the package is then handed me a small plastic vial. I thought undignifie felt undigd with the vaio. I idly wondered if my results would be affected by the lamb chops i had just eaten with a glass of wine or the residue from my lipstick. I went back to clearing the dinner dishes. One day an email containing the daresults appeared eisai puzzled my dna was 52 i wasnt disturbed or confused, even though they presented below considering all my ancestors were from eastern europe. As bland and innocuous as those boxes had been i thought i would clear it up by comparing my dna results with susies michael was sitting next to me in the corner ofof my office. I thought id pressed against mine as a side by side we lookea laptop screen. Later he will tommy already knew whabut i couldnt alloww myselfn begin to consider. On the wall directly behind us a portrait of my paternal grandmother her hair parted in the center pulled back tightly direct and simeon. Comparing largest segment. 9 greater than estimated number of the generations to end comparison took 0. 045 seconds. My voice sounded strange to my own ears. You are not sisters, not halfsisters . No kind of sisters. Estimating the number of generations to the most recent common ancestor. Here. The numbers, symbols, unfamiliar terms on the screen were a language i didntt understand. It had taken 0. 4538 seconds, the fraction of a second to upend my life. Theree would now forever be a before some of the innocence of a packing list for the preparation for a single trip, the portrait of my grandmotherra in its gilded frame. Either my father wasnt her father or my father wasnt my father i want to read a brief scene in the book. I sold my father was within 36 hours of making this discovery. I was able to discover because miraculously i have a couple of clues that have been laid out in plain sight that i had never seen. My parents have trouble conceiving me and have gone to an institute in philadelphia where they had used a donor. I was able to find my father within 36 hours and is a deep dive into the history of reproductive medicine in the country and the nature of secrecy and what makes a family a family. As my friend said yesterday that ddj affair had something in stoe for you. This is the scene where im about to meet my biological father for the first time. The streets were nearly desert deserted. We parked outside of a an italin restaurant that i have chosen. I didnt know the area and relied on the recommendations of local friend is one of whom is counted a couple places and send me photographs. Much of my anxiety had been put into making a restaurant of choice. It needed to be quiet but not too quiet, not empty at lunch ae shower or too busy. I didnt want us to feel rushed, nice enough to be relaxing. I then called the restaurant and asked for a corner table. My friend is specified which one and explained that it would be a special occasion, no, not a birthday or anniversary, just import and. I was in a state of high alert. Someones melodramatic novel and i was playing a character rather than living my life. I risk alienating him by askinga questions he remembered from the time or keep it polite chit chat how much would we share with each other and what about his wife . I wondered what it could be like married for 50 years, retired, three grown children to discover her husband had another child. We should go in. We still have half an hour. Maybe they arrived earlyav as well. I wanted to stay suspended in a moment before. I didnt have the muscle for this. Hohow could i be emotionally or psychologically equipped to meet the biological father i happened even known to have existed. Im not ready. We sat in the car watching the entrance. It hung over a small patio and it was still quite warm and unseasonably so. We have been married for 20 years and im about to meet your father. I considered wearing something of my dad to keep him close to me but i didnt want him at the tablem covering stricken, sorrowful. It felt like a betrayal of ones father that i was making my other father and my dad had known and have always loved me as i knew he did it would make it beyond measure if he had chosen to keep the seat great how could it feel now when it was too late to discuss it or make amends. I once heard a psychic say they are able to observe them. I watched the sidewalk. Lets go in, he said, i cant. I felt pinned toel this spot. You dont think that will insult him . Lt you have to just let this play out. Just then before i registered what i was seeing eye caught a glimpse of an older couple walking up the sidewalk in the distance. He was tall, whitehaired wearing a buttondown shirt and khakis. He said. F the car, he said its lovingly but firmly not taking no for an answer this isif my moment. I opened the car door and there was no going back. We moved towards onene another d it was probably no more than a halfdozen steps. There seemed nothing to do but acknowledged the strangeness to live inside of the world of the. It was bewildering to see the features reflected back at me all of the staring contests trying to make sense of my own, here it was finally irrefutably in the form of the old man standing before me. I stuck out my hand. His eyes crinkled, both were flushed bright pink. They were now both standing slightly apart from us and a passerby might take us for a family. He took a half a step towards me like a fragment from a dream his first words what it b would be t to give you a hug. [applause] now we are going to open it up to questions. My question is from adam shapiro. Youre mentioned on the inheritance or the issued inheritance. The book is titled inheritance. It operates on the level of inherited identity one of the things i came to understand is how they are formed by the stories that i told about myself or simply not true so theres that level of inheritance and the discovering of technically half jewish to entirely jewish matters to me not at all if justice holds a tremendous number of questions that i have had all my life because people from my past studies they are using a hybrid language study that isnt the same when they crossed the red sea. The other thing i would really say about it is these dna tests are creating offended air tips for people in all sorts of waysth theres a couple of people behind you and we dont have a lot of time. [inaudible] let me just clarify theres a line of people behind you and we are going to run out of time. I just want to let you know racism and slavery came from the torah [inaudible] im going to be a facilitator for your book. I loved it. It brought me to eat years. My question is, since time has passed since you finished the book, do you feel any differently about the whole situation . Do you feel anything different about your birth father what he has decided to do with the other people around . First of all, even my biological father . There havent been any more people. Im unusual it often when people are making these discoveries, there also discovering they have 47 other half siblings its a typical story these days but its not my story. Im kind of unusual in that way. The other thing i would say is that traveling for inheritance, traveling around the country. It has been such a remarkable privilege to be able to do. To connect with so many people who are experiencing this very modern phenomenon thats one of the social and bioethical issues of our time and connecting in that way. Its been a powerfully liberating and healing experience for me. Because ive gone to make meeting out of what life handed to me which is what i think we all want to do as poets and novelists. We want to make meaning. Do you have another book in the works now . I cant imagine what i will write next. Okay, thank you. Hello. I am so delighted to be here. My question is for danny. I have read all of your book. Im a huge fan of your work. Im an aspiring writer. As well. During the time i was reading your book, i got a call from my brother in new jersey. Basically, he told me i was the first person was learning about those. His wife had just received a text from a woman who was her halfsister. So the story has played out, the dynamics are similar to your story. So i was asked by my brother to be his sounding board and not say anything. Which was ridiculously hard for me. But i managed to do it. Im curious as to how many people have reached out to you. Who have similar stories. I think you are the impetus for it all. Its all changing because of you. When i first discovered this, i wanted to return the story to the story store. The answer to that question is very simple. Last year, 12 Million People bought dna tests. That number is expected to exceed 100 million in a year from now. About 200 people are making discoveries like has happened in your story. Im hearing these stories constantly every day, everywhere. It is not an exaggeration to say its epidemic. Thank you. To prepare for a preview, i read through all your memoirs also. Somehow, inheritance didnt come as a shock to me. It all made sense after reading all of the memoirs. Id like to ask each of you. Is writing about your life, examining your life the way you do, does it help you make sense of it . Because dan is like makes more sense to me than my life at this point. Im curious how it is for each of your. [laughter] thats a great question. I think its part of the process. I know that i write, just as danny said, to try to make meaning out of the stories weve been handed. It is part of the process i think. The danger is when it becomes a story and then theres the life youre living which is complex and difficult in many ways. They work together. In the end, the story is its own thing. This is my first pro book. Events happen mostly 40 years ago. For me, in order to write this particular book, i wanted to write it so the reader would never know more than i do at the time. Because i wanted to replicate a journey. So i actually had to relive it in order to rewrite it. And then reliving it, i got to be puzzled at my younger self and angry at my younger self. Many emotions. I think in that way, it did help me to come to terms with what had happened. It was a little like putting a giant jigsaw puzzle together. Upside down. So you dont get to see the picture while youre working on it. In the end, you have a picture. Its so interesting to hear you say that because i thought for a long time. The relationship between the self and the story is the story. If you had tried to write this book 40 years ago, it would be a completely different book not mediated by everything those 40 years has sort of, offered you all i will say is when i go back and reviewed yes, it does make sense of everything. When i go back and read my early work which this forced me to do. It was like, it is all there. It was in my first novel. In unpublished stories i was writing in graduate school. Is a term i write about an inheritance which is the unthought known. I think i was driven i the unthought known. What we absolutely no but is too dangerous to allow ourselves to think. Which is a lot of what i think makes writers, writers. We follow the line of words to use any dillards phrase. At least for me, thats how i discovered what i know but i have no idea what i think or understand or i fear until im following the line of words and it takes me to that place of understanding. Question for mla. I swear, i must be your biggest fan. Your essays in the book, every single one was powerful. But the one in the hospital. That has stayed with me for a while. Could you talk a little about it . Yes, thank you. My cousin everybody. [laughter] the experience happened august 7, 1994 and it would have been a very different essay if i had written it all those years ago. Took me a long time to figure out how to write that story. I needed the distance from it emotionally and psychologically to see it as a story and all the applications of the story. I opened the book with that because Toni Morrison talked about and not wanting to talk about the thing that happens first. So the reader wouldnt be looking for the climax of the tragedy that happens in the book. I thought about that a lot as i was composing this book and putting the essays together. He had shaped so much of my adult life. And then in the end, this was a man who was afraid and mentally ill. There were seven of us. No one died. And im fortunate to have had the chance to reflect on the experience. To think about how it shaped my life. And had to keep going back to the hospital because i developed in my bowel. Took seven years, which made biblical sense. Then we passed eight years and my husband and i were highfiving saying, we really killed this. Then i was sick in the hospital. The lesson is that we have no control over these things. And i have no control ultimately and how the stabbing impacts me. I was back in the hospital after i turned my books in and realized, i had believed i had written this out for my life that i really believe that and i learned an important lesson. The story keeps unfolding. But i also learned i had to live with my scars, really. Its how ive made sense of that experience. I have to make peace with the situation that keeps emerging in my life. And do the work i need to do. So its been an organizing event in my life. And im still understanding it. And its had more impact than i prefer. But ive had to make peace with that and i do that through the work. Thank you. Love you. Lets give them all a round of applause. [applause] you can continue the conversation at the autograph station on this floor past the elevator. Be viewed on the website at booktv. Org. [applause] good evening, everyone and welcome to the George Washington university. I am pleased to welcome you to tonights events presented in part o worship with politics and prose bookstore and the third in the George Washington University President ial distinguished events series. We launched the series last semester to give our students the opportunity to hear from renowned leaders of the individuals that bring illuminating dialogue, insight and inspiration to the campus. In the heart of the nations capital, the university is fortunate to be surrounded by